Sins Of Omission

Seems like, and I’m not making any guarantees about my reading comprehension at this hour – but seems like, if you get swept up in an immigration raid, you can argue that you shouldn’t be deported because ________ . But you need a hearing, so they schedule it, then they can lock you up, or let you go on temporary probation type stuff with your promise to return for your hearing. The report says that something like 90% of the people come back without a problem for their hearing.

The report says that ICE prefers the more expensive option of putting people in detention centers, but more than that, ICE transfers these people about- willy nilly – away from lawyers and family members – they will send a person from Indiana to a facility in Texas, for example, for the hearing, and the person being detained has to contact a lawyer themselves- paying a hometown lawyer to fly in, or trying to find a lawyer in the new area when they have no contacts.

The result is that something like 60% of non-citizens end up without lawyers to represent them.

It says a bit about children who either are orphans, and how they try to place them in childfriendly settings but there aren’t enough of those places (thanks, conservatives, for voting against funding), or how women get more flipped out when you try to take their children away to a different facility.

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But there was no other real mention of women, other than the chart that showed the gender differences in detainees, and an ironic little blurb that said the numbers had remained relatively steady over the timespan. Huh. I guess that women who are “sex-trafficked” certainly aren’t criminals – I mean that’s the whole point right? Though, these immigrants aren’t actually criminals either, that’s why they have a hearing. But from everything I read, women get sent back home too, anyway. I need to find out where the rights given to sex-trafficked people differ from other non-citizens who are guaranteed this “opportunity” of a hearing.

The fact remains, that the number of women detained as “non-citizens” has dramitcally increased – especially if we go by the ASTM numbers – if we go by those numbers, the amount of women non-citizens has gone up an astounding amount. They are given the choice, to plead guilty to prostitution, go to jail, maybe serve a sentence then get deported, or they are allowed to plead innocent by trafficking, and don’t go to jail, maybe stay with some christians, then get deported anyway. I gotta find, I saw it before, the number of trafficked people who are granted the right to stay in the country they were “trafficked” to, I remember it being kinda low, to my untrusting eye anyway.

What’s most disturbing about this is not so much that it takes women and puts them in this special “sex-trafficked prostituted woman” category and fucks around with their rights, but – I don’t even know how to word it, but you know how people are always ranting about how the “goddang forners come here to have their babies!” to get the awesome Murkan citizenship. – it’s the women who have the babies. It’s the women who are – for their own good mind you – “rescued” and then… well… yeah, deported or put in jail. There’s gotta be more than a handful of them who are pregnant when they get “rescued”.

If prostitution weren’t criminal, the problem wouldn’t be traffickers jumping at the chance to bring women to where they have all sorts of rights (which makes 0 sense anyway) – the problem with decriminalized prostitution is that you’d have to give these women-maybe-moms-soon their rights if they get caught as an illegal. If prostitution isn’t criminal, the cops have no reason to bust in and gather everyone up, if they did it for no reason, well, they can’t for no reason… they need to have “reasonable cause” and whatnot. Maybe. I dunno, they keep changing the laws, or just ignoring them.

Every day non-citizens in the United States are apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and placed in a vast network of detention centers that, during the most recent year for which figures are available (2008), housed 378,582 persons…. held in about

300 state and local jails which, under contract with ICE, receive a daily fee for their bed space.
nine service processing centers
six privately-run contract detention facilities,
42 contracted juvenile facilities, and
two family detention centers.

Non-citizens can be apprehended and detained by ICE for a variety of reasons. Many are taken into custody because the legality of their presence in the US is disputed and authorities want to hold them pending a decision on their deportation (or “removal”) from the United States. Authorities also detain non-citizens arriving in the United States without valid travel or identity documents.
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most detained non-citizens have the right to a timely “bond hearing”—a hearing examining the lawfulness of detention (a right protected under US law as well as human rights law)
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Once a non-citizen has been detained, the immigration authorities have 48 hours to make a determination as to whether he or she should remain in custody. If the immigration authorities continue to believe that the non-citizen is present in the United States in violation of immigration laws, they must also decide whether to issue a Notice to Appear in that same 48-hour window.18 The NTA is the document that states the agency’s factual basis for believing an individual has violated the immigration laws, and in most cases, why he or she should be removed from the United States. It is the linchpin for any non-citizen wishing to defend against the government’s claim that he or she should be deported from the United States.
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As with nationality, the gender of persons transferred also remained relatively constant between 1999 and 2008. For any given year, female detainees made up between 9 and 11 percent of the persons transferred, averaging 10 percent across the 10 years studied, as shown in Table 5

You can read about the horrendous treatment of women who weren’t lucky enough to get picked up when they were sex-working in a report called Detained and Dismissed. I guess they didn’t want to bring down the lighthearted mood of the general detaining report with all sorts of girl talk.